It was a different commute too, with a different purpose. So much had changed, not only on the outside of my life, but inside my mind, spirit and soul. I looked at that other person, that other me, as some kind of blind wanderer, stumbling in a kaleidoscope glaze through a world of illusions. Back then I could only naively suspect things that I now knew.
It was Tuesday morning, the day before New Year's Eve. I had left the farmstead that morning at 10:26, driving the short five miles to downtown Ayer. I parked in a free commuter lot and walked two blocks to the train station behind the post office. I waited about ten minutes with a small group of other commuters, and at 10:46 A.M., precisely on schedule, the train arrived with loud clanging. I boarded and took an aisle seat. Within a few minutes, the conductor arrived and I paid the seven dollars and seventy-five cents for a one-way fare into the city, receiving a pink punched receipt in return.
Within a few minutes I took a paperback book out of my pocket and began to read. I had bought it a few weeks ago for fifty cents at a used book sale at the middle school in Groton, a highly appropriate place to find such a book. It was called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published in 1974 after a long court battle with the federal government. My edition had the expurgated passages removed, indicating the number of lines that the CIA had censored by court order. In the introduction by Melvin L. Wulf, Legal Director of the ACLU, I read:
On April 18, 1972, Victor Marchetti became the first American writer to be served with an official censorship order by a court of the United States. The order prohibited him from "disclosing in any manner (1) any information relating to intelligence activities, (2) any information concerning intelligence sources and methods, or (3) any intelligence information."
The book itself opens with this passage:
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult---the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership extending far beyond government circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence---the academic world and the communications media. The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.
I smiled to think of how in my youth I had once thought I was aware of what all this meant, and had filtered it out of my calculus about American politics as a relic of the 1960s, before Watergate exposed it all. I cringed now thinking that this very attitude had itself become the greatest gift of all to the people that Marchetti was describing. That's what put us back to sleep, that delusion.
It was while I was reading this book that the train pulled into that station east of Concord, and I had that potent flashback I described above. I had anticipated this very thing would happen, which is probably why I had avoided taking the train into the city for almost two months after arriving here. Once upon a time, I would have made it my very first priority.
At 11:43, the train reached Porter Square (map), where I disembarked with many other passengers. I climbed the stairs to lobby of the subway station, where I fumbled to buy a four-dollar fare card, having to force the dollar bills twice into the machine to get it to work. After finally succeeding, I fed my card into the turnstile, then took the long escalators deep underground. At 11:55, the inbound Red Line train from Alewife arrived, and I boarded it headed into downtown Boston.
I had been on the Washington Metro a couple months ago, but it has its own unique aesthetic. The Boston train felt like the old kind---a real subway---familiar once again, bringing back a second round of the same awkward nostalgia and time-confusion.
At 12:08, the train arrived in Park Center, where I climbed the dirty concrete stairs to transfer to the Green Line, catching the trolley-like C line towards Cleveland Circle. It slid westward through the underground stations while I stood in the steps of the door well until a seat opened up. I cradled my paperback book in my pocket without reading it.
After a few stops, the trolley emerged up into the daylight in the town of Brookline, crawling along the middle of Beacon Street, which I remembered from my dark foray into the city to see Religulous the month before. The train glided into each stop while I examined the apartment buildings and busy businesses along the street. At 12:19, we arrived at Coolidge Corner, where I disembarked at last, and crossed the street northward by the famous S.S. Pierce Building at the corner of Harvard Street.
With plenty of time to spare, my first order of business was to check out the theater location, and to verify the showtime. In the company of other pedestrians, I picked my way across the street at a zebra stripe crossing and found the marquee at the proper address. The ticket window was closed, but the showtime was correct. It was too cold to walk around much, even with the sunlight, so I figured I would duck into a coffee shop and read my paperback book.
This being Brookline, there was no shortage of coffee shops, but each was crammed with customers. As I walked down Harvard Street, I passed a bookstore, The Brookline Booksmith. It looked inviting, so I ducked inside to warm myself. It was an independent bookstore, with a mix of new and old books. At the back of the store, I found a rack of maps and decided to invest five bucks in a street map of Boston, given that I had finally made my way into the city by train.
I perused postcards from swiveling metal rack, selecting two identical ones showing the S.S.Pierce building. It was just after that when I turned and my eyes fell upon a book that made my eyes grow large with excitement.
It was a hardcover book, just out in print. I recognized the title from online reviews. I pulled it off the shelf and immediately began reading the dust jacket, then flipped it open to begin reading the introduction.
I could barely keep my hands from trembling. I had dared not hope that the book could be what it was---so thoroughly researched and documented. It looked to be everything I hoped it could be. Here at last was the missing pieces of the puzzle.
For three years Thor and I had poured over every piece of evidence we could get our hands on. Everywhere we poked and prodded we ran into the same names, the same small cast of characters, as we put the story together, as if solving a mystery, a huge one, to reveal what the true history of the United States had been over the last century. It became almost a running joke, how easy it all came together, how obvious the clues were, once you started looking for them.
But there were gaps, mainly centered on a single individual during a certain time span. He had been so good at hiding his tracks. In these gaps we could only suspect without the kind of evidence we needed, even though the circumstantial clues seemed so obvious. There were "conspiratorial" sources to be sure, books written in flush of excitement by "fringe" authors without the heft of journalistic solidity. But we had needed more.
The very first page of the book blew my mind.
This is the story of a family we thought we knew---and a country we have barely begun to comprehend.
A country we have barely begun to comprehend. It summed up in a few beautiful words so much of what I had been fumbling to express.
Holding this new book in my hand, I felt as if the author had cribbed our notes. But I did not feel anger or jealously, only overwhelming joy. It was as if all along, he had been working on filling in those very gaps, bringing all the pertinent evidence to the surface, and spelling out the best case possible. He had saved us years of having to do the same thing. Yet like so many others he himself seemed to stop short of solving the entire puzzle. It was as if it were still left to us to put it all together. To do so had become my ultimate reason for living, to become aware, to find out the truth, as best I could, and to tell the tale of what happened in a way that others could understand.
I wasted no time. There was no question but that I had to buy this book immediately. I would be able to think of nothing else until I read it. I walked swiftly up to the front of the store with my postcards and the map in hand. At 12:46 PM, I bought the whole lot for just under forty bucks. It felt like a bargain.
Not wishing to be picky, I ducked into the first eating establishment with open tables, which was a bagel shop next door. At 12:52, I purchased a small coffee and plain bagel with strawberry cream cheese, then settled into a small sunlit table by the window. After wolfing down the bagel, I spent nearly an hour straight pouring through the book, skimming to pick out passages as if I were selecting delicious bon-bons from a sampler box.
At one point I got out the two postcards and wrote nearly identical messages by copying a particularly funny passage from the book, one that I knew would be understood by those receiving the cards.
At 1:56 PM, I put everything back into the bookstore sack, bundled up and headed back into the street. Three minutes later I was across the street in the lobby of the Coolidge Corner Theatre purchasing a ticket for Man on Wire.
It was a movie I very much wanted to see---an independent documentary financed by funds from the BBC about Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who in 1974 became the first and only person to wire-walk between the tops of the World Trade Center towers.
It had been showing in Fort Collins at the Lyric Cinema the week I left on my cross-country trip in Septemeber. I had intended to see it the night before I left, but had gotten caught up in last minute activities. I figured I had missed my chance, but two weeks ago, to my absolute delight, it showed up in the listings for the Coolidge Corner. Now I was glad I had waited. It seemed like the perfect event, to come into Brookline to see it on the next-to-last day of 2008.
The theater itself was magnificent. Unlike the other indy multiplexes in Boston I had visited (The West Newton Cinema and the Capitol in Arlington), the Coolidge Corner Theater was fully renovated in a hip and cozy art deco style. In addition to popcorn, there were coffee and treats for sale at the concession. Posters on the wall advertised the upcoming special events, including one hosted by the guys from Car Talk.
The ticket seller directed me upstairs. The auditorium for the movie turned out to be tiny, only a small room no more than 150 square feet. There were less than two dozen seats in five rows, all sitting on a flat floor. It felt eerily similar to being in the first class cabin of a passenger airliner. I moved my seat in order to keep the heads of several other people in front of me from blocking too much of the screen. This was especially important, given that much of the movie would be in subtitles.
I knew about Petit's famous walk from having seen the eighth and final episode of Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film when it originally aired back in August 2003. At the time, it was almost too excruciating to watch the photographs of Petit in mid-air. But that was a different person who had watched that. Fittingly Man on Wire would delve into Petit's walk from different angles, revealing much that was not in Burns' documentary.
It opens in media res, on the evening before the "coup," as they called it. As if revealing a dire secret conspiracy, we follow the plotters minute-by-minute---Petit as his henchmen---as they infiltrate both of the towers for the last time. Petit, who is still alive and well, narrates much of it while wearing a St. John the Divine t-shirt. How fitting!
The movie then skips back in time, to when Petit first learns of the existence of the towers as a young man in France and resolves to walk between them. We follow his career as he walks between the towers of Notre-Dame in Paris, and across the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
What we learn that was not in Burns' short piece was how detailed the planning was for the operation. One does not do something as complex as wire-walking between the World Trade Center towers without a lot of expert preparation. It was also necessary to draft the support of insiders who worked in the tower and helped them to gain the proper access. It also took amazing luck to pull it off.
Another thing that the documentary revealed, almost as an epilogue, was how the event changed Petit's life in unforeseen ways. He lost his girlfriend and many of his friends in the aftermath that rendered him famous for a while.
But unlike the case with Burns documentary, I suffered no vertigo this time while watching the footage of Petit on the wire walk. Maybe it was because I had already seen it, so it was not as novel. But part of me would like to think that it's because I don't fear things that I used to fear---not in the same way I did back then.
At 3:52 PM the final credits ended and I left the theater in Brookline. There was so much yet to do.
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